8 February, 2009

Ready to Upload?

It’s interesting, but he seems to completely ignore the power problem, and I can just see a world where traffic jams are replaced with packet collisions.

I also wonder how well a brain simulation can take into account all the influnce of our bodies on our brains. We don’t need terminally-bored silicon entities.

Update:

But if the simulation is accurate enough most of the silocon entities will be religious. This link is interesting enough for a post of its own, so I may repent and give it one later. A snippet:

The religion-as-an-adaptation theory doesn’t wash with everybody, however. As anthropologist Scott Atran of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor points out, the benefits of holding such unfounded beliefs are questionable, in terms of evolutionary fitness. “I don’t think the idea makes much sense, given the kinds of things you find in religion,” he says. A belief in life after death, for example, is hardly compatible with surviving in the here-and-now and propagating your genes. Moreover, if there are adaptive advantages of religion, they do not explain its origin, but simply how it spread.

An alternative being put forward by Atran and others is that religion emerges as a natural by-product of the way the human mind works.

That’s not to say that the human brain has a “god module” in the same way that it has a language module that evolved specifically for acquiring language. Rather, some of the unique cognitive capacities that have made us so successful as a species also work together to create a tendency for supernatural thinking. “There’s now a lot of evidence that some of the foundations for our religious beliefs are hard-wired,” says Bloom.